Crazy Tech Ideas, part 1

Thoughts from the past week, random links and random ideas to follow. If none of these tickle your brain, I’m sorry.

1) Installing applications to my phone was previously something I really hated. I remember how horrible it was trying to get oggplay installed to my phone, typing the url to the darn things browser. But hey, atleast my N95 already came with the solution (which I didn’t know how to use properly and in an actually useful way before): 2D barcode reader. I used 2D barcodes to my book catalogue (more about this later in this post) entries, but not on much else.

This is where The Most Excellent Mobile Barcoder comes into play… or would, if I’d use Firefox (*DOH*). But despair not, all you users of Epiphany, Konqueror, Safari or even Opera or IE! Since I happen to know the developer of the extension personally *cough*, I asked if he could do a nice little bookmarklet (to be dragged to the bookmark bar of the browser) for me :-) and so he did. It works on Firefox too ;-) I made a smart bookmark of it myself for my personal use; I’ll leave making of it as an excercise to the reader.

2) Fire Eagle and Twitterfeed are a nice way to inform your microblogging friends what is going on. Especially Twitterfeeds add some of the missing features in Twitter and Identi.ca that Jaiku (my absolute favourite microblogging service) already has. Fire Eagle allows me to update my location in multiple ways and to also publish it in many ways. My favourite updating tools are Plazes, dopplr and J2ME updater, and my favourite publishing tool is Eaglefeed.

3) Book/CD/DVD/perfume/shoe/jewelry database is what I’ve been thinking of lately. I’ve already catalogued my books and my CD’s, but I still haven’t entered my perfumes nor my DVD’s or the few games I have to any database. I desperately need a place to database them all, if for nothing else, for letting other people to know what not to buy for me. I was pointed to thinglink.org which might just be what I need. I’m planning to move my music/book collection to there, but what I’m thinking is that since thinglink is open source, it should be expanded and clusterized and clients for it should be made and and and… if only I knew how to code! I’ve not yet studied the whole thing throughly so I don’t know which of my ideas have already been implemented, but damn.

4) Hardware acquisitions are so difficult these days. About two months ago I purchased a hard drive for my laptop in the hope that it would solve my laptops sluggishness (as smartctl suggested my hard drive might be dying). I spent most of my still hangoverish Monday to go to Pirkkala verkkokauppa.com by bus from Hervanta to purchase a hard drive, they didn’t have the model I wanted on the shelf so I paid for a bigger model. I checked the hard drive and the laptop specs before I opened the package, and good thing I did. The laptop uses SATA, the drive I bought was IDE… >____< I just got the new correct hard drive a week ago, I still haven’t installed it, but will soon. BUT.

I need to buy more RAM, and this is where things start to get tricky: I have no idea what kind of RAM this thing eats and how much I should/could purchase. This document (PDF) tells me I could max to 4GB, but I’m still uncertain of the type of RAM.

5) Intrepid Ibex is out and since I’ve been running it on my laptop since August, I didn’t for once feel the odd jittery feeling and anxiety of a new Ubuntu version. I did attend the release day madhouse at #ubuntu and #ubuntu-release-party as a good IRC op should, but that was about it. I guess I’m a bit blind to the new and cool stuff in it, though I do appreciate seeing the fruits of the project I looked over during the summer by one of my Finnish Summercoders who I later recruited to work for Nomovok to be included in Intrepid.

I’ve had my share of problems with Intrepid though – and I’m sad to confess my tight schedule on both work and personal life stuff has prevented me from looking up most of them. My laptop has no wireless in Intrepid with the latest kernel of 2.6.27-7, for reasons I’ve not checked. Might be that I’ve blacklisted a module, though I doubt it as 2.6.27-6 works nice-ish (cuts the signal in a way that, for example, Skype calls hang up from time to time). My laptop has Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01), which works fine with ath5k.

6) Out of professional interest I’ve got a sudden urge to install Gentoo, LFS and/or *BSD on a virtualized system. Odd. Some may speculate I’ve lost my mind. Perhaps I have.

7) I want Nokia Internet Tablet n800 really bad. Not n810, I want especially n800. People have asked me *why*, but the answer is actually quite simple. I don’t need GPS, as my phone has GPS. I don’t want moving slided keyboard, as the hardware keyboard doesn’t have *the* Finnish keyboard layout I wish it had. I don’t want moving sliding keyboard, as it would be yet another moving part that would break when dropping the thing, or yet another moving thing collecting guinea pig hair or crisp bread crumbs in between the moving parts. The hardware specs are really better for me in the older model than in the newer one. Anyone care to sell me one cheap? I want to play Numpty Physics, do Ekiga calls, have Flash on my browser for watching youtube and Skype to work on a mobile device. These are the things my trustworthy 770 can’t do.

8) OMG OMG I wantzebra to Ubuntu, too! VOTE FOR IT! (and if you can contribute in the development, please add support for QR/DataMatrix, plz?)

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